Stefanie McCollum, Emergency Operations
Stefanie McCollum - Transcript
[00:00:00] I work at Global Affairs Canada in the Emergency Watch and Response Center where I'm the director of emergency operations. So, I oversee an amazing team. Principally they work 24/7 to support the department after hours and that includes all of our missions around the world.
[00:00:21] Yeah, mostly smaller emergencies. Of course, if it happens to us it's our own [big] emergency. So that could be lost documents, lost passport, delayed travel, flight cancellations or tour operators who go out of business, more serious emergencies like physical assault or injury or even death abroad.
[00:00:43] When there's a big emergency abroad, what do you do?
[00:00:45] We had a really bad hurricane season and we had a lot of Canadians affected by that. In 2017 you had Irma, Jose, Maria that hit 14 different territories and we needed to adapt our strategy. So some islands had power, some didn't. Some islands had airports and ports [still in operation], some didn't. Some were residents and they wanted to stay in their homes that were somewhat damaged and others were travellers who just wanted to get home. Where we had to, we chartered transportation options to get people off the really really small islands to the bigger islands.
[00:01:19] And are you a big team?
[00:01:21] Yeah we're a huge team so in a really large scale emergency, we're talking about whole of government. So it`s other federal departments, it's our colleagues from National Defense, and Border Agency, Immigration, and Transport Canada. And we all get together and work together to help a community of Canadians that are abroad. And that's really valuable in addition to the hundreds of people at Global Affairs Canada who volunteer after their normal workday to come help us on the phones or answering texts and who work on the emergency response. We have rapid deployment people who deploy abroad. So there are over 100 of them that are on standby and really ready to go in and kind of hit the ground running. So it's a massive team working on this. It's certainly not just me.
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